Garrett Vickrey

7.12.15

7th Sunday after Pentecost

“Still Speaking”

Woodland Baptist Church

San Antonio, TX

Hebrews 1:1-4

God is still speaking. That’s the essence book of Hebrews’ introductory statement of faith. God speaks. That’s what God does. God spoke long ago through the prophets. The prophets of the Old Testament that Hebrews is talking about is all of those who bore witness to God. Moses, David, Jeremiah, Isaiah. This is a reference to the big story. Hebrews begins the Christian story by connecting it to the old story of the Hebrews. This is a story anchored in the waters of the eternal deep, the waters God’s spirit hovered across in the beginning. We’ve heard those stories of God speaking then… God spoke to Abraham through three strangers whom he entertained in his tent. Jacob wrestled with an angel. With Moses there was a bush on fire. David heard God out in the fields, herding sheep. Ezekiel saw a windstorm. Isaiah heard God in a vision of the heavenly throne room. In Daniel there was a hand writing

on a wall. God spoke and was understood in many ways across Hebrew history. And these stories were told and retold. For hundreds of years they shaped the understanding of who the Hebrew people were and who there God was, until finally these stories were compiled into books and the books were compiled into the Hebrew bible or the Old Testament (as we know it). This process of compilation is called canonization. That comes from the word canon, with 1 “n”. Canon like law or regulation, not cannon like boom. Canon was a term that came from a reed in ancient times that was used as a measuring stick. The implications of this word are powerful for our understanding of how God spoke back then and how God speaks now. These stories were canonized so that they could be a measuring stick for judging our lives and our understanding of God. They are a measuring stick to compare our discernment of how God speaks to us. God spoke through prophets, through nature, angels, dreams, visions, a gentle whisper. 1

Often the bible just says “the word of the Lord came to…” or God said… How did God say it? What did it sound like? What words did God use to express the word? Sometimes we know, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes it was an audible voice. Sometimes it was an urge; a friend; a song; an event; a thought that burst into the back of the mind— a brain hiccup; sometimes we get the specifics, often we don’t. But, God also spoke through a Son. God spoke in a specific life. In a person who was who God is. The book of Hebrews says in these last days, God spoke through a Son, whom he has made heir of all things, and through whom he made the ages. Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory and an imprint of God’s being. In him we are given a window into the life of God; but, we aren’t just left at the window we are invited through (him who is) the doorway into the life of God. So now all of our understanding of who God is and who we are in the light of this God who created all this— all that understanding needs to be mediated by the story of Christ. If we want to hear God we have to first know God’s language.

That language is Christological. Through Christ we can hear and know. And so this is what we do as his followers— we try to know him better so that through him we can see the world the way God sees it; and we can know ourselves the way God knows us. Author Rob Bell tells a story about buying some new snorkeling gear one time. As he was pulling it out of its packaging a little tube of something fell out. He was so excited to get to the water that he didn’t think anything of that fallen tube as he grabbed the gear and headed out. So he got to the beach, put on the fins, adjusted the mask, and made sure the snorkel was firmly attached, and then he dove in, expecting to see the reef below in stunning color and detail. But he couldn’t. He could make out shapes and a bit of color, but otherwise his mask wouldn’t stop fogging up. It was then, out in the water, several hundred feet from shore, that he remembered that little tube, which he realized was a special solvent he’d heard about—one you wipe on the mask so that it won’t fog.

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He said really this is our job as ministers and followers of Christ, “to help people discover where they dropped that little tube, because seeing is the first step to pretty much everything.”1 The book of Hebrews is a sermon that tries to help us find that tube. It tries to help us see. It also tries to help us hear. Hebrews works on our ears to strengthen our listening through the worship of God. Its function always leans liturgical; its teaching always leans toward discerning God’s voice in our time. Over the next several weeks we will be looking at five passages from this book in worship. It’s the most intricate piece of literature in the New Testament. This passage that we read today is four verses and four sentences in English. But, in the original Greek it’s one sentence that includes a multitude of rhetorical devices like alliteration, contrasting statements, repetition, and temporal sequencing of events that all circle back from the beginning of the sentence to the end. It’s an intricate introduction to an intricate work of literature that seeks to answer the question: why can there be faith at all? The author was writing to a people who were struggling with how to live out their

faith. What does it matter? What’s the importance of Jesus? Does faith make a difference? The author might start off with a straight answer to these questions by saying, is faith in God viable in our world? Yes, because God is still speaking. This is the most frequent characteristic of God articulated in this letter— God speaks. Park rangers in national parks in the Rockies attempted to reproduce Bighorn sheep at one point years ago. But, they were unsuccessful because the sheep were relocated and placed in a new piece of land that didn’t have other bighorn sheep to direct them to different parts of the land for different seasons. Bighorns typically eat large amounts of vegetation quickly and then retreat to cliffs or ledges. They didn’t know where to get food anymore. They didn’t know where to run to for security. They had lost their link to the land. And the herd dwindled. The beginning of Hebrews acts as a link to a larger history. The author is trying to get the church to see themselves as a part of something larger… dating back further even than Jesus and his disciples. Jesus is the Son who 3

has been around since the beginning. He is not only the heir of all that is, he’s an active agent in the creation and sustaining of the world. And through faith in him we are connected to the story of God and humanity told in the bible. The early church was trying to figure out how to worship, how to sustain life, how to live together in community. And Hebrews tries to provide a connection… to help them understand where they are and where they are going. This book is trying to help them see that they are not just making this all up as they go along, but the Jesus story is the climactic chapter in the greater story of God’s redeeming work. For us today, this book is an invitation to faith in God. A Jesus centered kind of faith. A faith that helps us make sense of the world and our place in it. We live in a secular age; faith is no longer assumed. Theologian Jurgen Moltmann once said, “People no longer need God in order to explain the world, but they do need him in order to exist with selfconfidence, with self-certainty, and with self-respect.” We need that connection to our ground of being. We all need to explore our own link to our creator. Deep within us we

want to be known… we want to be loved… we want to be accepted. Bighorn sheep need other sheep to teach them where to eat and where to find rest and shelter. We need a connection to God’s word of life… a word that doesn’t end in these pages, but continues speaking words of life to us today. We need that link to find fulfillment and security. It is this word that maintains and sustains everything still… bringing meaning and purpose and hope to our lives. We don’t just live off what we see around us, but there is more that the word of God connects us to if we are willing to follow it. God is still speaking. In here. In books, dreams, visions, thoughts, friends, prayers. And we measure his voice by what we know of Jesus— the imprint of God’s being. Because of Jesus we know that when God speaks its going to sound like the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan or the Sermon on the Mount. Sometimes we get it wrong; we hear the wrong thing and do the wrong thing. But, the good news is: God is still speaking. Even when we misinterpret, even when we do the wrong thing. And sometimes in these missteps God says something new to us; reveals 4

something to us that we couldn’t have learned without our incidental cases of holy deafness. Helen Keller was the first deaf blind person to earn a college degree. And the story of how her teacher Ms. Sullivan taught her language as a child despite her blindness and deafness so that she could live a full life and communicate with others has been told in movies and books. When she was a girl, one day she was playing with a new doll. Miss Sullivan put her old rag doll into her lap also. She spelled d-o-l-l and tried to make Helen understand that d-o-l-l applied to both. Earlier that day they had had a fight over the words m-u-g and w-a-t-e-r. Ms. Sullivan had tried to teach her that m-u-g is mug and that w-a-t-e-r is water, but Helen kept mixing up the two and getting frustrated. She became impatient at Sullivan’s repeated attempts to teach her and, so she grabbed the new doll, and threw it on the floor in anger. And she was keenly aware that she could feel the broken shards of the new doll at her feet. Helen wrote in her memoir, “In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness.” She felt Ms. Sullivan sweep the broken

fragments of the doll to one side of the hearth, and Helen had a sense of satisfaction that the source of her frustration was over. Sullivan and Helen then walked down to the well house. Someone was drawing water. Sullivan took Helen’s hand and placed it under the spout. As the cool water gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word ‘water’, first slowly, then rapidly. Helen stood still, her whole attention fixed upon the motions of the fingers on her hand. A misty consciousness rushed over her— like something forgotten— a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to her in that moment. Everything has a name. As they returned to the house every object she touched seemed to quiver with life. She remembered the broken doll. And felt her way to the hearth to pick up the pieces— desperately trying to put them back together. We are so blind to the love of God that is present to us even in the unfamiliarity around us in the diversity of creation. We were all created in the image of God… and each of us named to express something of God’s nature… each an expression of God’s revelation 5

of love. God’s love is greater than we could ever comprehend… God is reaching out to us writing with his finger upon our hearts. But, we keep looking at the brokenness within us and the brokenness around us wondering what good could come of any of this? What good could come of me? But, the gospel reminds us that sometimes what we think is the end of our story is just another opportunity for surprise.

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Rob Bell, What We Talk About When We Talk about God, (HarperOne, San Francisco, CA: 2013) ebook.

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